


The Definition of "Human" Is Malleable As Fuck When It's Your Kid

by Corvid_Knight



Series: Integrated Worlds [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: D is SUCH a good dad, Gen, baby androids, dave hasnt been born yet, integrated worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 08:11:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14828622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corvid_Knight/pseuds/Corvid_Knight
Summary: D Strider leaves Earth—after his brother gives him a gift. A gift that needs a little work.





	1. Chapter 1

"Yo. D." 

You sigh, shifting Dirk's slight weight to your other arm as you turn to look at your bro. There's only one way this convo can go—all the talks you've had with him for the last three weeks, since you told him you volunteered for this semi-diplomatic thing to the new planet Earth's made contact with, have really just been one long argument. 

He says you're an idiot. You say you're just a curious fucker. 

He says you're going to get your damn idiot self killed, and the baby along with you. You say that the aliens—the trolls—have only killed a couple humans, most of 'em in skirmishes or when they were threatened, and there's already six fucking cases of trolls adopting human kids in the two years since contact, so Dirk is safe whatever happens. 

He says you can't think this is a good idea. You say you know it is. 

He says a lot of shit, and you try to answer it all as calmly as you can, and you are fucking _leaving_ in three days. Leaving him, taking pretty much nothing other than two duffle bags and your two-year-old kid. Leaving _Earth._ To live on a goddamn alien planet, with goddamn aliens, because of some kinda plan that has a lot to do with cultural exchange and preventing conflict and a lot more shit that you only have a vague knowledge of. All you know is that you volunteered because it seemed cool.

It still seems cool. Just...you're tired, the edge of fear over not being in the place where you were born is kicking in, and you can't handle continuing the argument right now. 

"What." Okay, you guess you didn't really _need_ to let your tone be that flat. "Dude, I still got shit to get ready, if you're gonna point out what's wrong with my fuckin' life choices you need to—" 

"Nah." He shakes his head and takes a step into the room, stopping to brush his fingertips across Dirk's tiny sleeping face. That's a weird gesture from him—your brother usually doesn't touch the kid, not unless you actually hand Dirk over to be held. Even then he's usually pretty damn reluctant. "Just wanted to give you something. Thought the brat might want it someday, I dunno." 

You have a limited amount of shit you can bring with you, but on the other hand, you still have maybe half your own body weight of the allotment left. Even with the weapons that you intend to bring (and haven't yet packed) there's still room for your bro's gift. Whatever it is. 

But. "If you hand me a goddamn dildo it's going right down your throat, bro," you warn him. 

The threat just earns you an amused chuckle, as he shakes his head and holds up what looks like a black box about the size of a DVD player. "Nah, the dildos are straight-out for you, not the kid. Plus, I'm not giving you any more after you tried to beat me up with the last one. This is a lil' more high-tech." 

"High-tech?" You raise an eyebrow, gently laying Dirk on the bed, in a pile of clothes that you're probably going to just donate. Not like you're dragging them halfway across the galaxy. Once he stops shifting and making soft baffled sleepsounds, you turn your attention back to your brother. "You have my attention." 

He shrugs, effortlessly flipping the box over to show a variety of ports on the other side. You see three sizes of USB, plus maybe a dozen or so less recognisable ports; he obviously built this to be hooked up to damn near anything. "So. What ya got here is a data storage unit, good for holding roughly the entire yearly output of all known daytime talk shows at one time—" 

"What, you counted those fuckers? I knew you had too much time on your hands, bro." 

"Shuddup—anyway, it's full." 

"Of daytime talk shows?" 

"Nah." 

"Then what?" 

He nods at the bed behind you. At Dirk. "Him, mostly. Remember when you got that neural scan for him? Tryin' to see if he had a condition or some shit?" 

"Yeah." For the first two months of his life, Dirk screamed constantly if he wasn't being held. At first you assumed it was normal, a reaction to the loss of contact, but when it fucked with his sleeping and playing, when he'd shriek for however long you set him down for, be it ten seconds or half an hour, you got worried. Then you panicked. Two weeks later you'd had him out through every noninvasive test you could dig up, including what your bro is calling a neural scan and you think of as _that weirdass alien mechanical mindmeld._ "What about it?" 

He holds out the box again. This time you take it, noting how warm the casing is with mild surprise. "They let me play around with the data once they were done with it. Next of kin, y'know. Downloaded most of it, added a fuckton of coding using his brain scan as a base, popped it in a case with a fuckton of shielding and a battery with about the same half-life as plutonium—that's an interstellar black box; they're rated to take anything up to being shot into a goddamn sun, you have no idea how hard it is to get one—and ended up with that." 

"With this," you echo. "What is this, exactly?" 

"It'd be an AI if it worked." 

"Dude, the military wants AIs. You could sell this thing." 

Another shrug. "They want _functional_ AIs, dumbass. That's not functional, in any sense of the word." 

"And you're giving it to me because..." 

"It's based on your kid. Might be cool to get it up and running someday; just 'cause I can't do it doesn't mean there isn't some grey bastard out there who can't." He grins, stepping in too fast for you to react and wrapping his arms around you; one quick squeeze, barely a hug, and he's back out of grabbing range. "Plus, I gotta give ya something to remember me by, right? Dunno when you're coming back, after all." 

You hate what flashes across his face as he says that. It's too fucking vulnerable, almost broken; a plea for you to stay. One heartbeat worth of begging, to make up for all the shit he'll never say. 

"Don't be a dick," you hear yourself tell him, instead of answering that already-gone flash of emotion. "I'll be back before you know it."

"Yeah, yeah." You can't see behind those pointy shades, but the subtle change of the angle of his head lets you know he's rolling his eyes. "Sure ya will. See you around, and all that. Love ya, D."

"Love you too, lil' bro," you tell him, mostly out of reflex. That's not something he ever says. 

He walks out of the room before you can say anything else, leaving you holding a warm data storage unit and swallowing down an unexpected lump in your throat, letting the faint bittersweet pain slide down to join the growing mass of it that's taken up residence in your chest.

* * *

You don't see him again before the ship leaves Earth. The box gets packed into the bag with Dirk's things, the one that stays with you more-or-less constantly, and is right next to you as the kid whines at being out of contact with you for the duration of takeoff. 

In space, you watch the Earth spin beneath you and wonder what your bro's thinking right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME POLONIUM ONLY HAS A HALF LIFE OF ~200 DAYS?? >:0|


	2. Chapter 2

It's a good couple months of settling in on Alternia before you manage to ask around for a guy who knows about programming. A major part of the difficulty here is the fact that troll tech and human tech are, for the most part, bafflingly dissimilar. A lot of the shit you see here has living things as components; mostly weird squishy things that remind you of the young of this alien species. 

Summoner, one of the guys who's been more-or-less assigned to keep an eye on you and head off interstellar political incidents if necessary, assures you that there's a big difference from the grubs that will pupate into trolls and the grubs that form the core of their equivalent of a cellphone or a laptop. Also different from the grubs they actually _eat_ ; you'll admit to freaking out just a little the first time you saw what the fuck grubloaf is actually made from. Bugs aren't supposed to look like...that. As long as your forearm, looks a hell of a lot like a grub you'd dig out of a rotten stump back on Earth but for the color, keeps squirming even after the blunt, insectoid head gets chopped off. 

Jesus, you kind of really dislike thinking about that. Just, euch. Dirk thinks it's hilarious, though. He'll sit on the counter, just out of danger range from the knife, and laugh at the damn bug the whole time. Summoner keeps giving him the severed grub legs to play with; the troll's kid, Rufioh, showed him how to make them twitch even after they're cut off. 

Speaking of Rufioh, you're...kind of really glad that there's a kid for Dirk to play with. When you were growing up, you always had your little bro, for as long as you can remember—there's what, three years between the two of you? And back on Earth, there was always the knowledge that there was going to be other kids, that your own kid was going to have friends and playmates and shit even if he _didn't_ end up with any siblings. 

(Which you don't intend for him to have. The siblings. You didn't really plan for _one_ kid, let alone more than one. Fuck, that sounds like he was an accident, doesn't it? Which...no. Just, no. Dirk was a surprise, not an accident. An _amazing_ surprise.)

For a while, you wondered if you'd made a mistake bringing him here instead of leaving him back on Earth, though. Mostly for the whole companionship thing. 

Then Summoner brought his toddler over one day, and shit was fine again. 

Rufioh was the one who reminded you about your bro's nonfunctional AI, too. The kid gets into everything—all kids that age do, you think—and he dragged the black box out of the closet to show to you, with Dirk trailing right behind him. 

You traded him some candy (which you have a sneaking suspicion is _also_ made of insects) for it, convinced Dirk to give you back the necktie he'd found in the closet, and started asking around about where you could find a guy who could take a look at some unique coding. 

Which, eventually, leads you to a blueblood who calls himself Darkleer.

* * *

He lets you into his workshop, head tilting the slightest bit at the sight of the golden-haired three-year-old clinging to your neck. It's a normal response to Dirk, on this planet—there's no natural blonds here, and dyeing a kid's hair isn't normal. Darkleer remembers that humans can, in fact, have light hair, and just nods, adjusting his square-edged shades in a way that's achingly reminiscent of your bro. 

Ouch. You hate it when small shit makes you miss Earth.   
"You would be D Strider?" the troll asks, stepping out of the doorway to let you come inside. "The Handmaid told me a human of that name would be coming with some tech for me to examine." 

"Yeah, man, I'm D." (God, the fact that no troll ever asks what "D" stands for is just...so fucking awesome. This whole time, you haven't had to give what you almost think of as your deadname even once.) "The lil' one's Dirk—I swear I'll keep him out of your shit—" 

"Wrigglers are welcome here." Darkleer shakes his head, a smile breaking the slightly-unnerving solemnity of his expression. His teeth aren't as sharp as those of the green- and yellowblooded trolls you've met so far, but less blunt than Summoner's or Handmaid's. Like they've been broken at some point, maybe. Anyway, the smile is friendly, as is the way he holds out his hands to Dirk. 

The kid looks up at you, a little uncertain. It took him a while to get used to the three or four trolls he sees every day, after all, and Darkleer's taller, with horns that're completely different and shades that aren't quite close enough to yours to be reassuring. 

"You're good, kiddo," you promise him softly, not making any move to hand him over yet. If he doesn't want Darkleer to hold him, you're not going to force it. 

And he doesn't seem to want to, at first—you're about to tell the troll that you'll just hold Dirk, it'll be fine. Then Dirk comes to a decision, unwinding his arms from around your neck and reaching for Darkleer, grabbing for his wrists as the grey-skinned hands lift him free of you. 

Darkleer waits for him to make himself comfortable, then nods decisively and turns to go back inside the workshop. You follow just behind, ready to take Dirk back if he starts crying. 

But he doesn't, not even when Darkleer gently deposits him in a fenced-off play area in one corner of the room. There's already another kid in there—another blueblood a little older than Dirk, with the same arrow-shaped horns as Darkleer and a mini pair of goggles pushed up on his forehead. Also a grub, chewing on a loose corner of the foam mat that's been put down to keep the kids off the concrete flooring. 

"Dude, holy shit." You haven't actually seen a troll grub in person yet; your immediate response is to squat down and stare at it in fascination. It's bright red, close to the same color as your own eyes—for some reason, you can't think of where that'd fall on the hemospectrum. When you put your hand up against the barrier, the grub immediately scurries over to sniff at you, its pure-red eyes wide and interested. 

Behind you, Darkleer clears his throat. "If you'd like to give me the thing you wanted me to look at—" 

"Oh, yeah, sorry." 

As you slide the backpack off your shoulders and unzip it, he continues, "It will be a few minutes at least—the wrigglers enjoy attention, if you'd prefer to wait here. The blueblood is Horuss; the mu—the _grub_ is Kankri." 

"They both yours?" you ask him, handing over the black box so you can step over the low fence. Horuss turns his attention to you for just a second, then goes back to chirping unintelligibly at Dirk, showing him a collection of glowing, interlocking blocks; Kankri starts rubbing against your shoes, making a soft purring sound when you scoop them up and cradle them in your arms. They're less squishy than the grubs you eat, like there's a tougher carapace just under their skin. 

Darkleer makes a choking sound, his face flushing blue. After a second, you realize he's trying not to laugh. 

"Horuss is," he says, after a second. "Kankri is my moirail's matesprit's. No lusus would take him, so Signless took him as a grub." 

"Ah." You're going to have to quiz somebody about that later. Why wouldn't a lusus adopt a grub? "They're both cute as hell, man." 

That seems to confuse him for a moment, but he nods and smiles again. "Yours seems like he should be a little warrior when he gets older, as well." 

Then Darkleer turns and heads over to the other side of the workshop, leaving you with the three kids. 

Horuss tugs on your pant leg, and you sit down with Kankri on your lap so he can show you how his blocks work. As soon as you do, Dirk perks up, reaching over to pat the grub's thorax. 

"Bug?" 

Well, he's not really wrong. "Kinda. It's a baby." 

Dirk considers that for a moment. "Bay," he says finally, and gives Kankri another pat before focusing on the blocks again.

* * *

You kind of lose track of time for a bit, just playing with the kids, but eventually you set Kankri down again and step out of the playpen, going to go check on Darkleer's progress. When you find him, he's seated at a desk, face blank as he scrolls through what looks like absolutely endless red code on a monitor. If you look close, you can see a secondary display in the lenses of his shades flashing blue, probably superimposing extra info over the red. 

"So, is it anything?" you ask him, and his head tilts in a tiny nod. There's a noticeable pause before he actually answers the question, though. 

"This...seems to be a variation of artificial intelligence that I haven't seen before." What the fuck is that in his voice? Confusion? Annoyance? 

"Yeah, uh. My bro wrote some of the code, ripped the rest from a scan of Dirk's brain." 

"Ah. Unconventional. _Fascinating._ " He hits a couple keys, waiting for the red code to collapse back to a main screen filled with Alternian writing before he looks back at you. "That would explain most of the malfunctions in the program." You

"Can you maybe edit it? Get it running?" 

"No to the first question—" 

Hey, why the hell does your heart sink when he says that? 

"—yes to the second." Darkleer makes that stifled laughing sound again at the look on your face when he says that. "He has _been_ running for at least a quarter sweep, by my best estimates. I'm not sure that it's even possible to turn him off; the maker of this code didn't include a shutdown command, and I have no real idea where I would insert one. The coding is enormously complex, closer to a living brain than anything I've ever seen." 

You think about that for a second. "Like, you're saying it's pretty much human." 

Darkleer just shrugs. "There has never been a set of parameters that define 'human,'" he says, apparently seriously. "Sentient. Self-aware. Capable of learning." 

"Damn." Bro made that. Kind of. Holy _shit_. 

"He requires a body," the troll says calmly. "Which I can supply, given some time." 

Fucking hell, but the first thing you think of is a corpse. "Uh—" 

"An android," Darkleer clarifies quickly. "I have plans for one, actually. I never intended to move past the planning stage for it—it would need an extremely advanced AI to drive it, after all, and most of the ones created so far have a learning curve that's unrealistic for biological beings, and completely unsuitable. But if you were willing to take on another young one, I would enjoy the opportunity to move that project out of the realm of thought experiments." 

_Another young one._ Wait, what? "What kind of bot are you planning on making, exactly?" 

He nods back towards where the kids are playing. "A child, designed to grow as a child would grow. Probably a twin to your Dirk, if possible—the AI is a imperfect copy of him, after all." 

"Imperfect." Even though you really should be focusing on literally any other part of that sentence, that's what you question. The one word that makes you weirdly defensive—how the fuck is this AI imperfect, exactly? What did it—he?—do to deserve being called that? 

"Well, yes. No copy is completely true to the original, after all. He'll be similar, but you can't assume he'll be a perfect copy—even zygote cloning can't accomplish that." 

"Oh. Okay, then." You sigh, and glance back at Dirk, who's petting Kankri with one hand, tapping one of the blocks to make it change color with the other. 

Asking more questions about this whole process would probably be a good idea. Or like, thinking this over. 

Instead, you ask Darkleer, "So, how long does it take to build this kind of a bot?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if "deadname" is an exclusively trans term or not? If it is, I maybe shouldn't use it in this; please tell me if that's the case.


	3. Chapter 3

Something shifts from lines of code to _feelings_ —cool metal under your back, how dry your eyes are as you stare up at a ceiling lit with long bright lights, how your body is suddenly actually a body rather than a digital simulacrum—and your brain overloads. It _hurts_. Everything _hurts_. You don't have words for any of it, a moment ago you knew everything about your existence but now—

So much. So _much._

You close your eyes and hear a thin, frantic whimper force itself out of your throat as you try to curl in on yourself. Your face is wet. Why is your face wet? 

Are you going to stop existing now?

You're _scared_.

"Holy shit, Darkleer, is he—" 

"I have been reliably informed that humans tend to have an adverse reaction to their. Hm." The second voice makes a growling, clicking sound; you don't understand him. You barely understand any of this. You _don't_ understand any of this. "Oh—birth?" 

"Fuck, okay, makes sense—" 

Hands come down to slide under your back and lift you up. You don't stop crying, but you do uncurl a little, reaching for him as he cradles you up to his chest. You don't have words for how this feels—soft fabric under your face, soaking up the tears there as you just keep sniffling. A hand in your hair, smoothing it down over and over. A soft voice speaking to you, the smooth and unbreaking waterfall of words overlaying something that you know is his heartbeat. 

Do you have a heartbeat? 

You don't know. 

"I should be running diagnostics," the second voice says.

And the first one, the one that belongs to the person who's holding you, stops talking to you for a second in favor of talking to him. "When he's done crying. Poor kid's had his mind locked in a fuckin' box for this long, he deserves this much." 

"...very well." 

You don't understand, but for some reason you know that's okay. The man holding you won't let anything bad happen.

* * *

The kid—Hal, you chose his name weeks ago, you can fucking use it now—gasps and starts crying when Darkleer closes the last connection, and as soon as the troll pulls away from him you scoop him up into your arms. He nestles against you, and you can't help but be so fucking _amazed_ at how close to human Hal seems—if you didn't know better, you'd almost be able to mistake him for Dirk. His hair's white like yours rather than pale gold, and his eyes are red rather than orange, but he's baby-soft and so small, so fucking almost-human. 

Nah, fuck almost. He's human. He's your kid. 

"Shh, man. I got you, you're okay. Not going anywhere, I swear, you're home. You're where you need to be, Hal, I got you. You're okay. I'm here, kiddo..." 

Darkleer shifts slightly, watching you. He's pushed his shades up for this; it's the first time you've seen his eyes, cobalt blue shockingly deep between the gold of his sclera and the inky black of his pupils. "I should be running diagnostics," he points out, but it's a statement rather than a demand, so you shake your head and hold Hal closer.

"When he's done crying. Poor kid's had his mind locked in a fuckin' box for this long, he deserves this much." 

Fuck. 

You could've had him in a body of his own when you first got here, if you'd had enough sense to prioritize. But you stalled, you left him as code in a fucking data storage unit, cut off from the sensory input a baby mind needs—

"...very well," Darkleer says quietly, cutting off your guilty interior rant. As Dirk finally finishes hauling himself over the low barrier between the playpen and the main workshop, the troll gets up to pick him up off the floor, settling your kid on his shoulders and guiding Dirk's hands to hold onto the long, arrow-shaped horns as he gently pushes Kankri—who only shed his grub skin a few days ago, and is a hell of a lot more fragile than Dirk for once—away from the fence. Once that's accomplished, he comes back to sit next to you again, disengaging Dirk and setting him on the table between the two of you. 

Dirk stares at Hal for maybe half a minute, and you worry about what he's thinking. Then he holds out his arms for you to pick him up, and you shift Hal's weight to one arm so you can pull Dirk onto your lap with the other.

"Who _this_?" One hand comes up to pat Hal's white hair gently, like the android is just one more troll grub. (You don't miss how Hal jerks at the unexpected touch. Or how he whines and leans into it. "Bug." 

You don't even try to muffle your snort of laughter—at some point, Dirk's three-year-old mind decided that _baby_ and _bug_ were close enough to be treated as synonyms. Some of the time he's right, sometimes not. Right now? 

"If he's a bug, you are too, kiddo." You lean down to kiss the top of Dirk's head, then Hal's. The former giggles, the latter makes a soft, questioning sound. "This is your bro. Your twin. Hal." 

You didn't think about the terms you were going to use. Not really. Not for the month or so it took Darkleer to build the body, not in all the time you spent cuddling your kid and/or other people's kids and thinking about how you might end up with two kids instead of one in a little while. Nah, that time was spent wondering _if_ it would work, not planning out how to adjust when it did. 

Maybe it's good you didn't try to plan it out. Means you're surprised at how not surprised you are, that you know exactly what Hal is to you and Dirk. 

"Bro," Dirk says decisively, and wiggles closer to wrap his arms around Hal's shoulders. 

When you look up to see what the hell the noise that Darkleer is making means, you see that he's grinning again. And—damn—and _purring._ It's a glad, proud, self-satisfied noise. 

You understand that noise. With your kids in your lap, you want to purr yourself. 

Since you can't do that, you settle for cuddling them both up close, telling them how much you love them in something between a whisper and a murmur, over and over again. There's tears in your eyes, but that...that's okay. 

Everything is superbly, perfectly, amazingly okay. Better than okay. Better than _anything._

These are your kids, and they're everything you ever wanted.


End file.
